Who are we
Up to some time ago the term "Museum", in the common meaning, was to designate a particular place of the memory where, harvests of particular finds, allowed to the researchers to deepen their own knowledge specifies in the various aspects of the knowledge, through the direct and comparative observation of the contained samples. Doing an analysis of the etymology "museum" we agree that it derives from the Greek Mouseion. This place-name meant in Athens a sacred hillock to the Muses, which were in the Greek mythology the divinities of the sciences and the arts, to them all the centres of search and the libraries were devoted. It is natural therefore that, after sometime, the term Mouseion ended up being reported to these places: it is enough to think about the most famous library of the antiquity, founded to the beginnings of the III sec. b. C. to Alexandria of Egypt, whose destruction has involved a long wisecrack of arrest in the tormented walk of the humanity. The library was at the same time a famous Mouseion, enriched by scientists and artists that found there true lifeblood of inspiration for their own works. It was also a place of culture in long alive and dialectics activity and not a simple harvest of different objects in a particular container. In tuning with its own statutory purposes and anticipating the cultural and scientific actual address of activity traced by the modern museum didactic, the cultural association of the Environmental Madonie's Museum, constituted without purposes of profit, and seated by the homonym Environmental Madonie's Museum of Polizzi Generosa, work since 1990 in common intents with the schools and the visitors, allowing and promoting with its own guides the direct knowledge of the surrounding nature. They are substantially two the finalities of this institution:
- The museum as tool of naturalistic education for today and tomorrow's citizens.
- The museum as point of reference for the scientific study of the territory, as place of harvest of data, finds, photo and anything else pertinent to the nature of the territory of the Madonie.

Where do we go
In this optics and in the belief that nowadays the Museum can offer notable supports to the formation and the orientation of the new generations we have not structured our Museum as a static place of maintenance and container of finds, on the contrary it has to be seen as a laboratory of cultural ferments. And this through panels and didactic supports, shows, lectures and popular publications, trying hard to incorporate the leading spirit of the Regional Law 66/75 which is, in synthesis, an invitation to use the Environmental and Cultural Goods as didactic subsidizes in the formation of the students of any order and degree. For a couple of years in Italy the Museum's Didactic has become an alive and working reality that is allowing a best fruition of our immense cultural patrimony; and the territory of the Madonie, which is also rich on it, could be no longer indifferent to the new problem of the role and the social function of the museums, always promoting the due adjustments of it to the increasing applications of knowledge from the new generations. As it is structured and proposed, the Museum constitutes a source of information and communication, a valid and permanent didactic benefit, a centre of solicitation for the knowledge of the territory of the Park of the Madonie, in its manifold natural and cultural aspects. In fact every visit of groups is preceded by a mini-lecture in which a profile of the Park in its historical-geographical aspects is traced and the characteristics and the finalities of the Museum are described. Small groups participate then to driven visits to the various habitats, during which are put in prominence, where possible, interdisciplinary aspects, so that the single sample can be seen as inserted in a context in which Geography, Hihistory, Hihistory of the art, Literature etc. have equal dignities. You should only think about the various references that are to be found in the literature to the flora and the fauna, and think about the stimuli (and they are not few) that can origin from the enormous patrimony of traditions and popular legends in which true or imaginary animals crowd and survive in our memory. Assuming that to protect any good it needs first to know it very deeply, we agree that the safeguard of the environment cannot be separated by what in today's terms is called Environmental Education. It is rather its fundamental presupposition. It is necessary to confirm it to avoid that this term, which is today perhaps too used, can become empty rhetoric. The ecology - the science that studies the environments and their connections - is a recent acquisition, and not because the man of the past didn't know how to live in harmony with the surrounding environment - it is rather the contrary true - but because it has been and it still is the contemporary man that has brought such damages to his environment to provoke repercussions to planetary level. In terms of globalisation is accustomed to say that a pulsation of wings of butterfly in Hong Kong produces effects on the opposite part of the planet, and this is true even more in natural circle. The ecology helps us to understand how much truth is hidden in this apparent paradox.